Dromospheric Generation: The Things That We Have Learned Are No Longer Enough

Felicity J. Colman is reader in screen media at the Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. She is the author of Film Theory: Creating a Cinematic Grammar (2014) and Deleuze and Cinema (2011) and editor of Film, Theory, and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (2009). She is also coeditor of Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (2007).

Paul Virilio’s work on dromology provides a model of a political economy. Called the “dromoeconomic” system, it incorporates aspects of temporality, consumption, and technology, arguably three of the core factors for consideration of the future organization of human societies. Durational factors manifest in issues of health, education, governance, and data. Consumption facilitates the politics of resource and territorial management; technology controls communication and transmission of energy at its base forms into the complexities of every facet of life. Living in a dromoeconomy means negotiating a material field created by the speeds of the global objects of communication. This article focuses on one aspect of the dromoeconomy, the users and producers of this system, the “dromospheric generation.” It explores the generation of the 2000s, users of screen-based digital technologies, in particular focusing on the digital child (“digi-child”) as the model information worker whose operational skills of “transmission” through game play are producing the material grounds of the future by transmitting energy in the dromoeconomy.